Last week I managed to make a copy-paste error and thus the link that was supposed to lead to my Dancer article lead to some other page. Luckily it was not some totally offensive page. I've included the same post with a - hopefully correct - link. Sorry for the inconvenice and thanks to those who mentioned it to me!

I noticed there are several people now watching the Perl queue of StackOverflow, picking up questions and posting an article with the solution. I think this is an awesome trend! Thanks to Miguel Prz (niceperl) for his weekly 'Perl on StackOverflow' report that probably have a great impact on this trend.

Ricardo Signes has announced the release of Perl 5.16. I would warmly recommend to download the source code version, compile it and send a thank you note to the Perl 5 porters who have been working hard to produce this release. Then test your source code with it and report any issues caused by the new release.

As a follow-up to last week's discussion, Ron Savage release v1.01 of WWW::Scraper::Wikipedia::ISO3166 that ships an SQLite database of countries and subcountries, and an interface to that db. He even explaines what is a subcountry.

CPANdeps, created and maintained by David Cantrell, provides a way to see all the dependencies of any give CPAN distribution along with the success rate of its tests. It helps you identify which ones of the prerquisites of a module might be problematic to install.

In his post Martin Evans described the changes and soliciting comments. If you are using DBD::ODBC, I'd recommend reading the post and commenting on the changes. The new version will be released soon and you'd better discuss the changes now than complain later.

Dr. Dobbs has published an interview with the inventor of the wiki and long time Perl hacker, Ward Cunningham. There are some interesting parts about 'technical debt' and 'refactoring'. Comparing that with the idea of 'If it is not broke, do not fix it' and the idea of 'Do the simplest thing that could possibly work'. These all sound like contradicting each other. On the 4th page he talks about Perl.

Christopher Frenz point out two services: codepad.org and ideone.com, that allow execution of Perl scripts by the casual visitor. I have not tried them yet but these could be great educational tool. Though I am not sure if in Perl programming or in security flaws?

I am sure you remember the earlier posts of David E. Wheeler about the Squitch program he is writing. Now he posted an issue which was very surprising to me. Should he use DBI to access the databases or should he use the command line clients? To me it was surprising especially as it seemed he is leaning towards the command line cliens. I would not even give them a chance. See the comments as well!

This is not good for strict versioning of the dependencies you are using, but during development, or just for fun, it is very useful to upgrade all the modules you have installed to their latest version. See the solutions of Sinan Unur using cpan-outdated and cpanm.

Responding to the commends on his earlier post, chromatic shows us how he uses Template::Toolkit. I must say this is too much for me. He is embedding even some Perl code in the template. While this is very powerful I am not sure if this is not the slippery road that leads to PHP/JSP/ASP style coding, where we mix too many languages in the same file.

Yanick Champoux announcing the new module and showing an example so he can avoid using the slightly complex Email::MIME, or more importantly, so he can write his e-mails in Markdown format that will be converted to either HTML or Text or both.

Mojolicious is mostly known as a framework to build web applications, but in this article Joel Berger uses its DOM parsion capabilities to download a web page and fetch some specific information from that page. (opening time of a shop in this case).

Daisuke Maki (lestrrat) is showing use some leaflets they have prepared to explain what YAPC is for people who are not familiar yet. We should all learn from the Japanese how to promote Perl and our Perl related events.

Chris Grau describes a problem that came up on their internal company Perl mailing list. (Stop here, how many companies have internal mailing lists for Perl?!) Then he goes through several solutions. One even using Regexp::Grammars. Then Marcel Grünauer comes up with a one-liner that at first sight seem to provide the same results. In any case, one can learn a lot from this.